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I recompiled my kernel so I had alsa as modules instead of built-in. The problem is the kernel compilation breaks the nvidia driver and later the installation. Because I reinstalled debian because of this yesterday already I don't feel like doing that again.

I did the compilation and now modprobe can't find the driver anymore. The nvidia installation program recognised the installed driver and removes it. Now I install the driver again, after building the kernel module I get an error that I built the nvidia module against the wrong kernel sources. I have my kernel source untarred in /usr/src/linux so I gave it with the --kernel-source-path but it still gives me the same error. Why can't it compile against the source I used to install the kernel now? When I compiled a new kernel once (without the driver installed) it worked fine and now I try to compile a new kernel and the driver and the installation break. This is how I build my kernels:

make clean /mrproper (tried both)
make menuconfig (only with make mrproper above)
make && make modules
make modules_install
make install

Could the problem be that with the first compilation a linux.old and linux is made (in lilo and in /boot it has some similar files of which I can't get the names now but vmlinuz and vmlinuz.old are there as well for example) and that it can't make this again if I compile a new kernel? Would it have a problem removing the linux.old changing linux to linux.old and then create the new linux in this folder for example?

Originally posted by johngalt As Iread in the long doc from nVidia, you have to recompile the driver if you update / recompile the kernel.

Yep the problem is that it won't build the new driver. I'll try the debian way drigz but it hasn't worked for me so far (tried like a hundred times with different tutorials but it always gave errors with the make-kpkg but I;ll take a look again) so I hope it'll go this time.

Well i just installed debian and recompiled a kernel by following directions from the debian site (i got sarge). but then i got sick of debian after spending about 20 mins trying to get make xconfig to work.

Now I think of it that would be like what I thought that the make install way doesn't properly replace the images after more compilations. That might explain why I couldn't compile kernel 2.6.8.1 which if I compiled always was 2.6.7 with a lot of errors. Maybe I'd better delete all the .old kernel files cause I can't look things up easily now on that computer.

Originally posted by drigz Well i just installed debian and recompiled a kernel by following directions from the debian site (i got sarge). but then i got sick of debian after spending about 20 mins trying to get make xconfig to work.

make menuconfig is a lot easier. I never got make xconfig to work even when I have a complete x system installed. make menuconfig only needs a few files, cpp, gcc, binutils, libc6-dev libncurses5-dev and make IIRC. I think if you need something else it's a dependency of those files

Originally posted by drigz But make xconfig is so much better - and it worked on slackware immediately after installing the qt package. I'm gonna try gentoo next for a distro with easy package management...

I thought make xconfig only looked a bit better. I have made the partitions for extra distributions and gentoo will be the first I try after I have everything in debian completely configured as I want. In fact I'd already have gentoo if I wasn't such a newbie when I chose the distribution. LOL I didn't know that I could use I386 on my PC and searched for I686 which I couldn't find very easy so I picked up my downloaded debian CD again.

I've fixed the error. Might be an error in my own memory, since I thought I always had ignored the gcc check failure. So I went into 'delete everything till it works' mode just ago and deleted cpp and reinstalled that in version 2.95 and it worked. I think deleting gcc would be better since there are no dependencies which have to be deleted as well. Deleting old kernel files in /boot and deleting all files in /boot and then installing the kernel on the clean /boot didn't work either BTW